Green’s Discovery Amber Ale

The Details

Brewery: Green's Gluten Free Beers

Origin: England

Rated On: April 24, 2014

Best Before: July 15, 2018

ABV: 6.0%

Ideal Temperature: cool to cellar temperature

Style: Belgian Amber Ale

Rating: OKAY

The Review

Green’s is a contract brewery based in England, who have their gluten-free beers produced at the DeProef Brewery in Belgium. This is their amber ale – made with millet, buckwheat, rice, and sorghum, and fermented with a strain of Belgian yeast.

This 500ml bottle pours a clear, medium copper amber hue, with two fingers of rather puffy, somewhat rocky, and duly foamy off-white head, which leaves a decent landscape of splattered lace around the glass as it lazily recedes.

It smells of a pale, quite thinly rendered mirror-world toasted grainy malt, sour fruity red vinous notes, a bit of bready yeast, and some rank weedy, grassy hops. The taste is semi-sweet, gritty, well, hard to describe musty, and earthy, something, but it ain’t barley or wheat, that much is certain. I don’t know if the spoiled red wine character is from the alterna-grains or the hops, which are kind of herbal and metallic in their own right. A soft, almost funky yeastiness sort of wafts in and out of the scene. The carbonation is moderate, just a gentle probing frothiness, with a spiking zing here and there, the body a so-so medium weight, on the back of a sugary, barely tempered cloyingness. It finishes still kind of sweet and medicinal in a musty, ill-kept fruity manner, like stale cider.

Not a particularly reasonable answer for those celiac beer drinkers out there. A whole different beast, this version of an amber ale is, and despite what it says on the label, it really doesn’t resemble anything from any Belgian brewery that I’ve come across in the gluten-tolerant world. An earnest effort, but in the end, non-beer offerings like this do not further the cause of full-flavoured, rounded, craft beer, gluten-riddled or not.